It was a Jewish neighborhood that no longer exists on the ground but lives on in memory and imagination: Lawndale, the storied old West Side.

Irving Cutler, the preeminent historian of Chicago's Jewish past, grew up in Lawndale himself and has written about it many times as parts of books and articles. But there has never been a book specifically about that area, he said in a recent telephone interview.

Yet there is still much interest. "There are still many people around who lived there, and many of them got their offspring interested," Cutler says, noting that meetings of a group of former West Side residents that calls itself the Great Vest Side often draw as many as 800 guests.

"The area was the center of Jewish life during a half century of existence, and I thought somebody should come up with something to remember that area and keep it from disappearing," Cutler says.

The result is a new book in the Images of America series, "Chicago's Jewish West Side" (Arcadia Publishing). It covers the area-which stretched roughly from California Avenue to Cicero Avenue and from Arthington Street to Cermak Road-from its beginning as an urban settlement that came into being right after the Great Fire of 1871, to the present day as a neighborhood largely populated by Hispanics and African Americans. More than 200 photos bring the past to vivid life.

But the book focuses on the years when Lawndale was the glorious center of Chicago's Jewish world. (Cutler explains that the term "West Side" encompasses several neighboring areas, including Garfield Park and Austin, but that Lawndale was the heart of the Jewish community.)

Cutler himself is a professor emeritus of urban geography and the author of a number of other books about Chicago. This might be the one to which he is most personally connected.

He explains that Eastern European Jews started moving into Lawndale - formerly home to immigrants primarily from Poland, Bohemia and Ireland - from an earlier Jewish neighborhood, the famed Maxwell Street. "When Maxwell Street started breaking up as a Jewish community around 1910 to 1920, most of the Jews moved straight west about three miles and settled in Lawndale," Cutler says.

It was considered a step up on the economic and social ladder. "Unlike the Maxwell Street area, North Lawndale had no wooden firetraps, pushcart merchandising or sweatshops," Cutler writes in the book's introduction. "It was a relatively new, quiet residential community with Douglas and Franklin Parks and the more distant Garfield and Columbus Parks." It boasted two spacious boulevards, Douglas and Independence, and many two- and three-flat brick homes with front and back porches and back yards, compared to the wooden tenement buildings of Maxwell Street.

Cutler grew up in the area and lived there for three decades, and his memories of that time are intense.

"Wherever you went, you heard Yiddish spoken," he says. "On almost every corner, there was a kosher butcher shop and a mom-and-pop grocery. On the High Holidays, it was magnificent - on Douglas Boulevard, you would see thousands of people dressed in their finery. They would go hopping from shul to shul - their shul, their parents' shul. On Succos, you would see men heading to shul before work with their lulavs and their etrogs."

It was a friendly place. "There was a lot of outdoor living," Cutler says. "This was before air conditioning, and in the summer, everybody was out sitting on their front porch. Everybody knew everybody. You didn't need to call in advance - you just dropped in. In the evening, there was an endless procession of people selling ice cream bars for three cents or a nickel."

The parks were important features of the landscape. At Douglas Park, you could rent a rowboat for 25 cents or go ice skating in the winter. Franklin Park and Garfield Park had beautiful flower gardens, ball fields and swimming pools that received heavy use. "Before most people had cars, they would use the neighborhood facilities," Cutler says. "On hot summer nights, people would take their pillows and sleep in the park. It was perfectly safe and they had no fear."

The neighborhood also boasted at least 60 and at times 70 synagogues, many of them shtiebels (small synagogues in a home) that met in a rabbi's house. Some of Chicago's most prominent synagogues began in this area and many still exist today, although most have merged with other synagogues.

But the neighborhood was also chock full of more secular attractions. At least six movie theaters, including several that showed Yiddish films, were concentrated in an area of Roosevelt Road between Crawford and Kedzie. "Cars would go up and down the streets advertising the movies and that the theaters were air conditioned," Cutler recalls.

It was also the heyday of the Yiddish theater, and residents could see many of the stars of the day at several venues, including the Douglas Park Auditorium at Kedzie and Ogden, which was owned by the Workman's Circle, a Jewish labor organization. Yiddish theater reigned there from the 1930s to the '50s, Cutler says, and featured many of its top stars, including Molly Picon, Dina Halpern and Bernie Schwartz, later to be Tony Curtis.

Right across the street, Cutler says, was a popular restaurant, the Ogden Huddle, owned by Eli Shulman, the founder of Eli's Cheesecake, still a top Chicago purveyor of sweets and perennial favorite at Taste of Chicago.

Other restaurants and delis were concentrated in an area around Kedzie and Roosevelt Road, which also was home to several "gambling joints," Cutler says. Neighborhood characters included "Zookie the Bookie" and one of the most famous Jewish gangsters, Davey Miller, who owned a pool hall. "A lot of the young, tough Jewish guys would hang out there," Cutler says. "The elders would frown on it." The gambling establishments "were not legal, but operated anyhow," Cutler says.

For those more interested in an honest day's work, elevated and bus lines on Douglas Park, Garfield Park, Roosevelt, Crawford and Kedzie took hundreds of workers downtown to the South Loop garment district every day. Closer to home - right in the neighborhood, in fact - was the headquarters of Sears, Roebuck, the company Julius Rosenwald founded that, at the time, employed more than 10,000 people, many of them Jews from Lawndale.

The facility, just north of Roosevelt Road, stretched for about three-quarters of a mile and contained the store's catalog facilities, buyers' office and the first actual Sears store in the country in the original Sears Tower.

Cutler's wife worked there too, and he recalls that "they had an outlet store of overstocked goods for employees. Almost every night, my wife would come from work with a real bargain. We never used whatever it was, but it was a real bargain."

Sears employees had another perk: "a beautiful little park right across the street," Cutler says. "They would go and sit and have lunch there."

He says that although there were also several manufacturing plants in the area, they were staffed mostly by non-Jews. Jews who didn't work in the garment district downtown or at Sears had their own small stores right in Lawndale.

For the neighborhood children, Cutler says, there wasn't much organized activity, but kids "automatically went out in the streets after school and had baseball or football games." There were three main youth groups, he says, including one run by a church. "They tried to convert Jews but never had any success. Jewish kids would come there, watch movies, play ball and eat candy at Christmas" and then leave just as Jewish as when they came.

The focal point of the area for people of every age, however, was the Jewish People's Institute on Douglas Boulevard, built in 1926. It was the successor to the Chicago Hebrew Institute from the Maxwell Street area and had a library, gym, swimming pool, museum and a famous restaurant, the Blintzes Inn. More than 80 different organizations met within its walls, but Cutler says it is best remembered for the roof garden dances that took place every Sunday during the summer.

"Young and not so young people would come there and dance under the stars to a live band," Cutler says, "I know of at least 25 couples who met at those dances. I know a woman who lived in Elgin but would come to the dance every Sunday with her girlfriends because there weren't many Jewish men in Elgin. She told me she came until she caught one."

Cutler didn't meet his wife there, though. Although as a young woman she lived about a block away from him, they didn't know each other through the neighborhood but met at a Zionist camp.

The JPI went out of business in 1955, as the Jewish population was departing the neighborhood, and is now a public school, Lawndale Academy. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, however. Cutler says that among the many who patronized it were bookseller Stuart Brent, future judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz and Jake Arvey, the alderman and powerful political boss of the 24th Ward Democratic Organization. Author Nelson Algren often used the library.

Many other famous figures came out of Lawndale and the JPI, Cutler notes, including comic Shelley Berman, author Meyer Levin (Cutler calls his book "The Old Bunch" "the best book on Lawndale"), actor Sam Wannamaker, boxer Barney Ross and columnist Irv Kupcinet.

Even Golda Meir, the future prime minister of Israel and a native of Milwaukee, lived in Lawndale for a time and worked at the Douglas Branch Library. Cutler has participated in ongoing efforts to have the building where she lived, at 1306 S. Lawndale, listed as a Historic Landmark. At hearings a few years ago, he says, Valerie Harper, in town at the time to play Meir in "Golda," gave a moving presentation to the Landmarks Commission. So far no decision has been made on the matter.

Another seminal building in the area, Cutler says, was the headquarters of the Forward newspaper at 13th Street and Kedzie. "On presidential election days, before most people had radios, they would flash the results on the walls of the building across the street as the votes came in, and people would huddle around there to see it," he says.

The area was also home to a strong political organization, the 24th Ward Democrats. "They were very well organized and would get out a strong vote," Cutler says. "When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran, I think the Democrats got 99 percent of the vote (in the area). Jake Arvey said the only ones who voted Republican were the Republican precinct captains."

The ward organization reached into many areas of life, he says. "The political machine would help people, bring them food if they needed it. There was a precinct captain on every block and they would come into homes before elections. They were very strongly organized. President Roosevelt said it was the best precinct in the whole country."

The future State of Israel was also a focus of Lawndale Jews; Cutler calls it "a strong Zionist area" with many Zionist groups operating. His own four older sisters "were ardent Zionists who used to hang out at the Labor Zionist Building on Douglas Boulevard, and they would drag me there as a kid," he says. "They were always singing Israeli songs and dancing the hora."

One sister, in fact, was married in the building, which led to a series of comic complications. "There used to be a Jewish radio program and the announcer knew my sister, so he casually congratulated her and said where the wedding was going to be and that everybody was invited," Cutler recalls. "When my mother heard that, she almost fainted."

She soon came up with a solution to the problem of feeding the many extra guests: sending young Irv, with his little red wagon, to a day-old bread store, where he was to purchase 25 loaves along with a number of large salamis. "They were up all night making sandwiches," he says. "A lot of people came and there was dancing until 3 in the morning." That sister and her husband eventually moved to Israel and lived on a kibbutz.

But Cutler says that growing up in Lawndale did more for him than just create colorful memories. He went to elementary school and high school there, then went on to Theodore Herzl Junior College, right in the neighborhood, where he says he got "a good two-year education that was basically free." He became interested in the city of Chicago as a youth and took advantage of Lawndale's abundant transportation lines to ride to other neighborhoods.

His interest in Jewish communities grew indirectly, he says, after he wrote a book on Chicago and began giving tours of the city. When a synagogue asked him to give a talk on Jewish neighborhoods, "I became fascinated by them," he says. "I was born on Maxwell Street, grew up in Lawndale, lived on the South Side for a while, then moved north. Living in all those different neighborhoods gave me a little insight," all sparked by the years in Lawndale.

Like Cutler and his family, in the ever-shifting pattern of the Jewish community, Jews began moving out of Lawndale in the late 1940s, and by the late '50s, there were few Jews left there. The exodus, Cutler says, "was part of the general trend after the war of people wanting homes of their own, better schools, better amenities. One of the shortcomings of Lawndale was there were very few single-family homes. Most of the buildings were two-flats, three-flats or apartment buildings."

The GI Bill, he says, helped returning service members buy homes, which accelerated the movement out of Lawndale and into South Shore, the city's North Side or suburbs like Skokie and Lincolnwood.

As Jews moved out, African Americans moved in, but unlike in some neighborhoods, the transition was a peaceful one, Cutler says. "In some other neighborhoods there were riots, but there wasn't any of that in Lawndale. The Jews just left and the blacks moved in. I don't remember any antagonism. It was a very peaceful change." His mother and sister became friendly with some of their new neighbors, African Americans and Hispanics, and continued the friendship long after they had moved from the neighborhood, he says.

The area suffered much destruction during widespread rioting in the city in 1968, and some sections of it have never been rebuilt. For a while, some of it was a wasteland of shuttered stores, littered empty lots and drug houses, but recently there have been signs that it is coming back, and gentrification may even be beginning there. Many of the old synagogues still stand and are used as churches or schools.

Today the Jewish community is scattered, with some population pockets in various Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs, but Cutler says he doubts there will ever be such a concentration of Jews anywhere in the Chicago area again. Yet his book is testament to the fact that, in memory and history, there will always be a Lawndale.